Pin@clip (or “pina-kuri” in Japanese) is designed for the Shibuya area, a district we all know how easy it is to get lost and bewildered in. Users can take pictures of shops or places that take their fancy, leave a comment and review it for the rest of us. Usefully, a lot of basic info about stores (opening times, address, google map etc) is automated from a database. IPhone users will be happy because the application connects to the camera and compass, allowing you to see things on the camera screen directly (just like the Sekai Camera).

You can also add emoticon-style faces to indicate your mood about the shop etc. The application integrates with the retail services of its makers, the Tokyu Corporation, through a Tokyu Hands logo that links you to that store’s floor guides.

http://anfischer.com/?p=321

Beech wood, poplar plywood; 40 × 60×20cm;
The data sculpture Fundament shows the allocation of the world’s gross domestic product in comparison to the worldwide derivatives volume. The statistical data was aquired from the CIA World Factbook and the International Monetary Fund. The sculpture consists of two layers which visualize two data sets with the same principle. The lower half is a mapping of the world’s GDP and the top half is a mapping of the derivatives volume, alloted to the coordinates of the countries on a map. This sculpture is a statistical map, a hybrid between physical and conceptual space. The horizontal arrangement equates to the Mercator projection of a world map and the vertical axis metaphorically corresponds to the financial activity of the country.

Five years from now, it is likely that the mobile phone you will be holding will be a smooth, sleek brick — a piece of metal and plastic with a few grooves in it and little more.

Like the iPhone, it will be mostly display; unlike the iPhone, it will respond to voice commands and gestures as well as touch.

“So much of how we understand technology is visually driven,” says Rachel Hinman, a strategist with Adaptive Path, a user-experience and design-consulting firm. “Mobile interface design has to mimic the touch, sight, gesture and auditory feeds that we use to interact with our environment.”

That means speaking to your phone rather than typing, pointing with your finger instead of clicking on buttons, and gesturing instead of touching. You could listen to music, access the internet, use the camera and shop for gadgets by just telling your phone what you want to do, by waving your fingers at it, or by aiming its camera at an object you’re interested in buying.

Over the last few years, advances in display technology and processing power have turned smartphones into capable, if tiny, computers. As a result, phones have gone beyond traditional audio communication and texting to support a wide range of multimedia and office applications.

The one thing that hasn’t changed, until recently, is the tiny keypad. Sure, there have been some tweaks, such as T9 predictive text input that cuts down on the time it takes to type, a QWERTY keyboard instead of a 12-key one, or the touchscreen version of a keyboard found on the iPhone. But fundamentally, the act of telling your phone what to do still involves a lot of thumb-twiddling.

Experts say the industry needs a new wave of interface technologies to transform how we relate to our phones. The traditional keypads and scroll wheels will give way to haptics, advanced speech recognition and motion sensors.

Touchscreens Everywhere

Until Apple’s iPhone came along, keypads were a standard feature on all mobile phones. The iPhone paved the way for a range of touchscreen-based phones, including the T-Mobile G1 and the upcoming BlackBerry Storm.

“What’s a shame is everyone’s following Apple now,” says Gus Desbarats, chairman of The Alloy, a UK-based product-design firm. To take the next step in phone design, mobile-phone companies will have to make radical changes in how they create their products.

“Most user interface experiences today start around a new generation of microprocessor or new screen technology,” says Desbarats. “Those things are important, but companies need to ask themselves: What kind of devices do we want people to really have?”

Take the touchscreen. So far, even iPhone clones require navigation across multiple screens to complete a task.

That will change as touchscreens become more sophisticated and cheaper. Instead of a single large screen that is fragile and smudged by fingerprints, phone designers could create products with multiple touch screens.

A prototype from The Alloy shows two touchscreens folded into a clamshell with the keypad and other functionality available on one of the screens and the ability to manipulate photos and other information on the other.

Speak to Me

Users could also interact with their phone by simply speaking to it using technology from companies such as Cambridge, Massachusetts-based Vlingo.

Vlingo’s application allows users to command their phones by voice. That could enable you to speak the URLs for web pages or dictate e-mail messages.

Natural speech recognition has long been challenging for human-computer interface researchers. Most devices with speech-recognition capabilities require users to speak commands in an artificially clear, stilted way. They also tend to have high error rates, leading to user disenchantment.

10 Things 3D Printers Can Do Now!

The concept of custom manufacturing is exciting to nearly everyone, but it always seems to be something that will happen in the “future”. Gibson was right and the following list of applications for 3D printers show the truth in the saying “The future is here. It’s just not evenly distributed yet.” The following items are all available for purchase or are being used in industry now….

Visa is adding a wireless twist to the old phrase “Charge It.”

The credit card processing giant announced Thursday several initiatives to allow its credit card toting customers the ability to transfer money, make payments, and receive real-time account notification alerts on their Nokia and Android cellular phones. Visa also struck a mobile deal with U.S. Bank.

Under a pilot program with U.S. Bank, which is scheduled to begin by the end of the year, Visa will offer mobile money transfers from one Visa cardholder’s account to another. A U.S. Bank Visa cardholder would use a Web browser on their phone to access funds and transfer it directly to the recipient’s account. The recipient could then withdraw the funds from an ATM machine, or use the money to make purchases.

Visa is also working with cell phone giant Nokia and new entrant Google’s Android to offer mobility to its service.

The Visa-Android deal calls for Chase Visa cardholders to use their Android phone for not only transferring money, but also to receive real-time email alerts when transactions happen on their Visa account, receive offers from merchants, and view images on Google maps to find the location of those merchants who are offering the specials. The Google-Visa deal is expected to begin sometime by the end of the year.

Visa has also struck a similar deal with Nokia for its Nokia 6212 Classic phone. That service is expected to beginning next month.

planet eye

Early in June, the interesting product PlanetEye wasn’t ready for real-world use. Since then, the site has opened to the public and gone through a redesign. It’s now worth checking out for planning vacation travel.

The organizing principle of PlanetEye is the “Travel Pack,” which is a way of categorizing your destinations. You can create a Travel Pack for anywhere you’re going and then drop restaurants, hotels, and activities into it. Photos of your destination or activity (from other users) show up on a Pack page, and PlanetEye will put a Pack’s items all on a map for you and let you easily share your Pack with others. I’m thinking of creating a “Rafe’s S.F. Visitor Guide” pack to send to people who come to visit our home.

Packs also recommend alternate activities. At some point, they’ll will be prioritized based on a social formula; right now they just seem to be highly rated professional reviews. Which brings us to the best part of this service: the content. PlanetEye aggregates professional reviews and makes them all easy to find and discover. There are a few useful expert articles on the site as well. And it’s a very attractive site–more travel magazine than utility. Combined with its recommendation system and Travel Pack organizational scheme, it makes for a good system to collect activities, lodging, and dining options for a location.

However, the system doesn’t do enough for you once you’ve built your checklist. Yes, it does connect you to hotel sites for reservations and to OpenTable to book restaurants. But there’s no timeline view of your activities to go with the map view, so planning your attack on a vacation spot is still a manual process. I’d like to see a planner like TripIt, or a printed city guide like Offbeat Guides, to go with my Travel Packs.

Artist Ingeborg Marie Dehs Thomas set out to explore that concept, in a wonderfully geeky, surreal project called “the bubbles of radio.” Thomas visualized six contemporary radio technologies, drawing inspiration from “richly illustrated books on botany, zoology and natural history.” The result was a series of illustrations re-imagining radio waves, like RFID, Wi-Fi and Bluetooth (pictured above) as a fictional species.